I can't believe I forgot to write this up – I love this place! We were in Vicksburg and ready to turn north for home, when the Mab came to me as if out of a dream, whispering in my ear, "Go down to the crossroads."
I was stunned and amazed. "Are you saying what I think you saying?"
She said, Puhlease! In Mississippi is a town called Clarksdale, and I saw there's a Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale. Do you want to go?
Well, she knows that I'm a blues fiend from the southside of Chicago. I'd heard of the storied place of Clarksdale. What? I said, You really want to do this?
She rolled her eyes. I'm dense sometimes.
She'd read that a lot of big blues musicians came from here. It's the Mississippi Delta, after all, the birthplace of the blues. But the sheer number of these stars blew me away. I'd find that out later. From Vicksburg, we made a beeline north, following the river.
We drove past mile after mile of scrubby cotton fields, more than we'd ever seen. So much, that windblown cotton was strewn on the sides of the road like the whispers of early November roadside snow in Illinois. The plants themselves were thigh-high scrub bushes with snowy-looking leaves. Field after field, mile after mile on both sides.
Not only that, but then it sunk in, what road we were riding. It was US Highway 61 North. This is Highway 61. We are on the Highway 61, like from the Dylan song and album. So that's what's what about Highway 61. It's where the blues came from. It's the birthplace of rock 'n roll. Right here, under our tires, out in these miles of snowy bushes that brought all of the money and sorrow. Like I said, I'm dense. And up ahead, where Highway 61 meets Highway 49, is the fabled crossroads where you might meet the devil, sung about by Robert Johnson and all the people before and after him. Now those crossroads look like a busy intersection in Anytown, USA, but this place has history, it has roots. We put on the Dylan song to get us to Clarksdale.
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| The crossroads of Hgwy 61 & 49: where's Robert? where's Eric? |
It's in the old train station in Clarksdale which Muddy Waters himself took out of town to Chicago and never looked back.
There's a long, completely safe concrete ramp leading in, but before I tackled it I had to check out the outdoor stage and performance space because I thought I saw a familiar face there. It was painted on the corner of the stage.
,
Sure enough it was a painting of Robert Plant, who visited along with Jimmy Page when they released their album, Walking Into Clarksdale. Plant is a major donor. I was going to like this place.
The place is a huge collection of memorabilia, costumes and guitars from the vast army of blues musicians who came out of these parts. The list of them is dizzying: Robert Johnson, Howlin' Wolf, Charley Patton, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Son House, Sam Cooke, W. C. Handy, Koko Taylor, Ike Turner, Junior Parker, and that's only some of them. My jaw kept dropping everywhere I turned. You can't snap pictures because of copyrights. No pictures of the shack that was Muddy Waters' childhood home, that now stands in one end of the museum. No pictures of Alan Lomax's sedan, outfitted with a recording rig in the trunk that he used to tape blues songs in the field that are now legend. No videos of the concerts that were running on the museum's monitors either. Sure makes you pay attention though!
The woman at the front desk was a Southsider too, and there was a cool dude who took me around to the school space in back where lessons were in session for the next generation of bluesmen (and bluesbabes? because one was a girl).
The entire place is flat and accessible. There's even a ramp in the back room so I could join the jam session. They make sure the blues is for everybody, baby.
We also saw a telegram from the Rolling Stones to Muddy Waters, which was OK but it told us something outstanding. We used to live in Westmont, Illinois, and we knew that Muddy Waters had owned a home there too. We never knew where it was, although once Mab worked with a photographer who said he lived in the place. Well, we found out the address from the telegram, and he lived on the same street as us! Yeah baby.
I think anybody would like this place. I was a kid in a candy store.
Write on brother!
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